The real problem with telling young writers to fan out across genres and forms is that it doesn’t help them find a voice. If anything, it’s antivoice. Learning the craft of writing isn’t about hopping texts like hyperlinks. It’s about devotion and obsession. It’s about lingering too long in some beloved book’s language, about steeping yourself in someone else’s style until your consciousness changes colour. It’s Tolkien phases and Plath crushes. It’s going embarrassingly, un...

The active pursuit of uplift really took hold as a scientific
field during the great flowering of transhuman
culture, an era that also gave us the widespread settlement
of space, extensive human genetic modification,
nanotech, cognitive science, and the digital emulation
of consciousness. It is in fact the convergence of these
fields, and the feedback loops spawned between
them, that enabled the uplift project to make so much
headway so quickly.
It’s easy to see uplift as a breathtaking cu...